CHAPTER XXIII. JAPANESE BUR- 

 BANKS AND MORNING-GLORIES 



THE Japanese are the aesthetic nation 

 par excellence; no doubt of that. 

 With us devotion to beauty is 

 individual and exceptional; with 

 them it is national — a great moral 

 force like religious devotion. Imag- 

 ine Americans getting up, as the Japanese do, 

 to attend five-o'clock garden parties to see the 

 morning-glories in all their glory! 



To be sure, there are morning-glories and 

 morning-glories. We think ours, as they climb 

 up on strings and show their red, white, and 

 blue blossoms, are pretty, and so they are. 

 To a Japanese they seem "little wild things, 

 like weeds, not beautiful or worth growing"; 

 and so think those Americans who have seen 

 the asagao, especially in their sublimated stages 

 of owa and fukurin. j 



Everybody knows how much more beautiful • 

 the Japanese iris and the Japanese chrysanthe- 

 mums are than any varieties of these flowers wfe 

 have produced. But the Japanese flower of 

 flowers is the morning-glory; not the lovely j 

 thing our seedsmen sell under that name — a\ 

 great improvement on our common varieties — \ 

 but something infinitely more lovely, varied, \ 

 and ethereal; morning-glories worthy of the ■ 

 poetic names bestowed on them, such as Frozen 

 Moonlight, Tuji's Snows, Foam of the Sea, 



